INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM COXON
As he prepares to rejoin his former bandmates in Blur for an epic gig in front of tens of thousands of people at the official Olympics Closing Celebration Ceremony in Hyde Park, Graham Coxon keeps it real with a solo UK tour – which ends with gigs at Exeter Phoenix and Falmouth’s Princess Pavilions. Laura Williams finds out more…
Coxon is championing a big competition for his forthcoming tour – to find local support acts in the towns he’s playing. Bands have been submitting their videos to his site and people have been voting, with Graham getting the final say ahead of the gig. “I suppose it’s a competition of sorts,” he said. “It’s good having something different every night and also, if they’re local, they can bring their mates along and have some decent support as touring support slots can get a cold reception.”
He said he’d try and watch the support bands but told us he didn’t really listen to much new music, unless someone tipped him off. He said: “I don’t search endlessly for it as I don’t really know what to look for. Like I don’t know what’s a good fish to eat unless someone tells me that’s a good fish to eat.” Interesting metaphor. He’s full of them today. When asked about the varied sounds on his back catalogue of eight albums, he said: “I do listen to a lot of different types of music, which collate at various times in my life. My albums all come from similar influences, but different elements of the influences. I seem to go round in circles and things pick up like a snowball but it’s just a different snowman at the end of it.” OK.
The bespectacled 40-something reckons that his forthcoming album, A+E, harks back to his 2000 solo album, The Golden D, a bit. He said: “I was quite structured with my last one, I wanted it to be jazzy, swingy and folk-like, with a lot of different instruments but I was writing a lot on the bass for this one – which makes it a lot more basic. Women love the bass.”
Talking of women, Coxon is touring with a band he has been playing with for a while (not Blur) and one which includes a couple of female multi-instrumentalists and backing vocalists. “We’re more like librarians than rockstars,” he said, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. “All stripes and glasses.”
Asked whether he’s been to A+E, he recalled an incident when he was on tour with Seymour (an early incarnation of Blur). He said: “We all got sprayed in the face by mace. It’s really nasty stuff. Other than that, I’ve not really been to A&E.” Quite why they got sprayed in the face with mace, I guess we’ll never know. He added: “It’s not from personal experience but I wanted to create that neurotic/paranoid/heightened sense of anxiety of being in A+E.”
He goes on to talk about abusing technology for the album artwork – saying: “For ages I was working on the idea of artwork for a 12 inch – but it doesn’t really work when cut down to CD size or being looked at on an iPhone, so I ended up taking a nasty image on an old Nokia phone (I’ve got an iPhone too).” And then there’s the video for the single ‘What’ll It Take’, which involves a collection of footage of fans doing prescripted dance moves. Coxon said: “I hope there’s not enough room for people to do that at the gigs.”
See Graham live at Exeter Phoenix on April 29 and Falmouth Princess Pavilions on April 30.
